Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth

261 Pages·2009·3.86 MB·English

by  Jed Rasula (auth.)

Modernism and Poetic Inspiration
Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues top-
ics in the burgeoning field of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetics.
Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series
includes social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construc-
tion of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissem-
ination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of
poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals
of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the
poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems.
Topics that are bibliographic, pedagogic, that concern the social field of
poetry, and reflect on the history of poetry studies are valued as well. This
series focuses both on individual poets and texts and on larger movements,
poetic institutions, and questions about poetic authority, social identifica-
tions, and aesthetics.
Language and the Renewal of Society in Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson,
and Charles Olson: Th e American Cratylus By Carla Billitteri
Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth By Jed Rasula
Modernism and Poetic
Inspiration
The Shadow Mouth
Jed Rasula
MODERNISM AND POETIC INSPIRATION
Copyright © Jed Rasula, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61094-1
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
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world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers
Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-37658-2 ISBN 978-0-230-62219-7(eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230622197
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rasula, Jed.
Modernism and poetic inspiration : the shadow mouth / Jed Rasula.
p. cm.—(Modern and contemporary poetry and poetics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Poetics. 2. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) 3. Poetry, Modern—
History and criticism. 4. Modernism (Literature) I. Title.
PN1042.R26 2009
808.1—dc22 2008051797
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: June 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Figures vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Permissions xv
Introduction: Shadow Mouth 1
One The Murmur: Modernist Alchemies of the Word 13
Two Drawing a Blank: Episodes in the Poetics of Unworking 43
Three Poetry’s Voice-Over: Techniques of Inspiration 97
Four Gendering the Muse 139
Five Medusa’s Gaze: Deep Image, or Traveling in the Dark 159
Six “When the Mind Is Like a Hall”: Places of a Possible Poetics 187
Notes 205
Bibliography 219
Index 241
Figures
1.1 Francis Picabia, La Sainte Vièrge 19
1.2 Otto Nebel, Unfeig 36
1.3 Man Ray, Space Writing (Self-Portrait) 41
2.1 Microscopic Enlargement of Robert Browning’s Voice 57
2.2 Alexander Melville Bell, “Sawing Wood” 59
2.3 Viking Eggeling, Sketch for Diagonal Symphony 66
4.1 Siegfried J. Schmidt, “original ist nur die kopie” 150
6.1 Friedrich Kiesler, Horizontal Sky Scraper 188
6.2 Fritz Kahn, “The Surface of One Man’s Bloodcells” 196
6.3 Fritz Kahn, “The Work of the Heart” 198
Preface
T
he subject of this book is poetic inspiration, but this is not a trans-
historical account. Most of the work I attend to is from the past
150 years. Yet much of the primary research involved concerns
ancient Greek prototypes (Muse, Orpheus, Medusa). There is precedent:
the sense of modernity in poetry I address here derives from Mallarmé, who
characterized his aspirations in terms of an “orphic explanation of the earth.”
Orpheus—having suffered infernal descent in vain, subsequently torn apart
and beheaded by the Maenads—has been astonishingly reanimated in the
twentieth century (by Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus most famously, but also
Cocteau’s films, and countless artworks and musical compositions).
Gramophones
Pianolas
Orgues
Tous répètent la musique d’Orphée
Le 11 septembre
Sur la Tour Eiffel
Il donne un concert T. S. F.
(Lyrik I, 218)
These lines from Yvan Goll’s “Le nouvel Orphée”—the title poem of his
1923 book—despite the uncanny premonitory date linking the inaugural
radio broadcast in Paris with the attack on the World Trade Center eighty
years later, attests to an Orphic dissemination through modern mass media,
which might seem as inimical to Rilke’s pastoral Orpheus as Baudelaire’s
famous embrace of metropolitan vulgarity for its poetic nourishment. But
the quotidian, the daily dross, he insisted, though half of “modernity” in art,
was only half; so a host of mythological figures roam Baudelaire’s Paris like
x ● Preface
the oldest homeless people on earth. If most of the poems cited in the fol-
lowing pages are modern, their authors felt (“in their bones” T.S. Eliot says)
a mythopoetic silt underfoot.
Any book that appears to capriciously dart about from antiquity to
modernity will seem peculiar, especially a work of scholarship. But as with
a previous book, This Compost, this one tilts the application toward poetics.
That’s to say, the writing itself is not an instrumental expedience; it vibrates
to the sound waves of its subjects. Nearly every page portends a three dog
night. I abide by Laura Riding’s supposition: “To go to poetry is the most
ambitious act of the mind” (Poems 410), though there’s no denying the pre-
tentiousness of speaking about “poetry” as such, and the abject lark of that
pretence extends to all the other subjects thronging at the gateway here:
muse, inspiration, voice-over, not to mention murmur and blank and all the
country cousins given passkeys with such terminological abandon. Guilty
on all counts, I offer this study as a plea-bargain with fellow travelers, those
who know themselves in Riding’s sense as “equal companions in poetry.”
The full context behind Riding’s salutary insistence on companionship
between reader and writer is worth quoting, and heeding:
In poem-writing and poem-reading the stirring up of the poetic faculties
has been a greater preoccupation than their proper use; the excitement
of feeling oneself in a poetic mood has come to be regarded as adequate
fulfillment both for the reader and the poet. Hence the frequent vulgar-
ism “What is this poem about?”—when the reader feels that there is an
element in a poem beyond that designed to evoke in him the flattering
sensation of understanding more than he knows. . . . The trouble is that as
poets have transferred the compulsion of poetry to forces outside them-
selves, so readers have been encouraged to transfer their compulsion to
the poet: the poet in turn serves as muse to them, inspires the reasons of
poetry in them. And the result is that readers become mere instruments
on whom the poet plays his fine tunes . . . instead of being equal compan-
ions in poetry. (408, 411)
Riding’s “companions in poetry” resonates with Robert Creeley’s dedication
to what he called “the company” of fellow poets, artists, and readers held
in trust; and these configurations in turn are picked up by Robin Blaser
in his homage poems to “Great Companions,” Robert Duncan and Dante
Alighieri.
The germination of material for this book goes back to the early 1990s
when I gave talks at various conferences and institutions sparked by a ques-
tion one panel organizer had posed: “What do we talk about when we talk
Preface ● xi
about poetry?” I welcomed the provocation, as it made me realize that “we”
(in the public domain, in thrall to anthologies with titles like The Voice That
Is Great Within Us—twisting the thematic screw of Wallace Stevens into
the moral agon of nationalism) invariably presume that voice to be speak-
ing about “us.” I wrote an exercise in literary sociology on that subject, The
American Poetry Wax Museum, pondering the fractured, discontinuous,
uneasy situation of poetry appropriated for some ostensibly universal but
invariably parochial cause—poetry taken under the wing of a charitable
institution, beneficently taken for granted, and neutered in the process. My
term “poetry’s voice-over” made its debut in the model of the wax museum
(cf. Wax 36–51), where it referred strictly to a special effects studio, a.k.a. the
English Department of the New Criticism and the consequent intersections
of reputation and expectation it engineered.
In Modernism and Poetic Inspiration I follow a completely different way
of thinking and imagining voice-over, more honorary than onerous, but not
without its perils and traumas. Literary history requires document, proof,
but a work of poetics (stimulated all the while by every kind of evidence that
comes to hand) really sails by the seat of its pants, takes nothing for granted.
Where poetics is concerned, there is no risk assessment, nor any assurance of
gain or predictable outcome. It’s more a matter of getting your head around
something. The political term for this prospect is anarchism, and as this
book elaborates, an-archē encompasses that which is ungrounded, without
foundation, as well as what is baseless in a telling vernacular expression. It
will seem paradoxical to cite a precedent for this unsecured vulgar local-
ity, but that’s a role Mallarmé plays here, the poet of Un coup de dés with
its typographic theatre of unmoored destinies. “For him,” Jacques Rancière
observes, “every poem is a layout that abstracts a basic scheme from the spec-
tacles of nature or of the accessories of life, thereby transforming them into
essential forms. It is no longer spectacles that are seen or stories that are told,
but world-events, world-schemes” (Future 94). To this disarmingly expan-
sive prospect, I would balance the scales—and welcome the reader aboard—
with Marianne Moore’s salient menu from “Picking and Choosing”:
only the most rudimentary sort of behavior is necessary
to put us on the scent; “a right good
salvo of barks,” a few “strong wrinkles” puckering the
skin between the ears, are all we ask.
(Poems 138)